Völuspá

Völuspá ("Prophecy of the Seeress") is the first poem of the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems. J.R.R. Tolkien was influenced greatly by the saga, and Christopher Tolkien even suggests that "those Dwarf-names in The Hobbit provided the whole starting-point for the Mannish languages in Middle-earth"[1][2]

In particular almost all of the names of the dwarves of Middle-earth, as well as Gandalf's, are taken from a section of the Völuspá called the Dvergatal (the "Catalogue of Dwarves").[3][note 1] The Dvergatal is contained in stanzas 10–16: